Bio572

Quantitative Methods and Statistics in Ecology

(formerly know as Tools of the Ecological Detective)

-Learning to be dangerous with statistics!

1. Intro
2. Lab
3. R
4. book
5. data
6. equals
7. glmm
8. guide
9. help
10. important
11. interesting
12. lessons
13. likelihood
14. link
15. logic
16. mark down
17. mixed model
18. nested model
19. plotting
20. probability
21. programming
22. related
23. schedule
24. script
25. statistics
26. text
27. variance
28. workflow

A bit of philosophy

As ecologists we're used to the messy realities of nature. We think carefully about how to approach a problem, spend inordinate amounts of time researching methods and equipment, and then, when everything breaks, find creative work-arounds to make our experiments work somehow. Yet when it comes to analyzing our messy, complex data we seem to look for the quick way out—canned statistical packages that we don't understand, tortured transformations to shoe-horn our data into a form that we can plug into a statistic we already know, or worst of all, ignoring lots of data because we don't know what to do with it. Well not any more!
We think that as ecologists we should spend as much effort trying to understand our data and answer the questions we first posed as we do collecting the data themselves. We'll need to be creative, we'll need to spend a good deal of mental effort and maybe even some time in the statistical literature to find our way through, but in the end we'll have a much stronger sense of what we found and what we can infer. My goal is not to make you statisticians, but to give you a perspective and some tools that will help you take on your interesting ecological questions. We may not know everything there is to know, but we'll know enough to be dangerous!

Keep in mind:

• If you can't write down your problem, you don't understand it
• There are almost always other, sometimes more elegant ways to answer a question or get (R) to do something, but who cares about elegance?
• Most of what you learn in this class, and your graduate education will take place outside of the class room
• Sharing code makes you a good person
• Commenting on and improving other people's code makes you an even better person
• Our goal is to make you "dangerous," not perfect, so don't worry too much about mistakes (but do fix them!)

The What, Why, and How of the wiki:

• We will use this wiki to organize the class (e.g., I'll keep the schedule up-to-date), post labs, and share answers, ideas, and resources.
• This is a collaborative site where each of you can add to or edit any page. The more you add, the more useful it can be.
• Click on the edit button above on any page to add or edit the contents.
• Click on the plus next to "Pages and Files" to add a new page. (Use a descriptive page title and add relevant tags)
• If you want to add a file use the "link" or "file" buttons in the editing view
• If you totally screw up something, we can always "roll back" to a previous version.
• The help is pretty good; use it if you need!